Photo taken by James Plumtree of a depiction on a plate of the birth of Manas.

Analyzing Kyrgyz Narratives (AKYN) is a collaborative course-integrated digital project that recorded, transcribed, and analyzed six metrical oral Kyrgyz verse narratives by two different Kyrgyz manaschis (performers of the epic Manas), Talantaaly Bakchiev and Doolot Sydykov, narrating the birth of the titular character Manas. The project was developed by faculty, staff and students at the American University of Central Asia (AUCA). The project data was integrated as a learning tool in two courses taught by James Plumtree: the undergraduate level “Manas - Texts, Contexts, and Tradition” and the masters level “Epic - Theory, Practice, History”.

Project resources

• Analyzing Kyrgyz Narratives (AKYN) – project website
• Project data (freely available):
  • Audiovisual recordings cataloged at the Open Society Archive
  • Transcripts of the recordings at the AUCA project website

Project team members

• Dr. James Plumtree, Assistant Professor, AUCA, instigator and research
• Dr. Anguelina Popova, Associate Professor, AUCA, Project Coordinator, organizer, liaisons
• Alymkan Jeenbekova, (former AUCA staff, now Humboldt University PhD Candidate), Research and Transcriptions, liaisons
• Kamilia Baimuratova, (now AUCA alumni) Audiovisual recordings
• Kamen Bonov, computational methods and website design
• Ekaterina Kombarova, AUCA, website design

Project digital pedagogical goals

• Make accessible for the classroom contemporary performances of the Manas epos by notable modern performers
• Apply methods from the Digital Humanities to a new corpus of an understudied language - such as computer-assisted textual analysis to identify characteristics of an individual performer
• Facilitate further potential research using this corpus by making it Open Source

The primary research goals of the project

• Address the frequently held idea that modern performers ‘recite’ rather than ‘improvise’ a text by comparing variants to confirm improvisational methods by using computer-assisted analysis of the two performers.
• Establish whether the Parry-Lord theory of oral formulaic composition is applicable for Kyrgyz oral epic poetry.
• Collect a corpus of contemporary material that can be used by scholars with other research interests.

Course learning outcomes

• Collect, and make accessible, contemporary performances of the Manas epos by notable modern performers to be used in the classroom (since versions usually used are historic variants).
• Student participation, and critique, of contemporary scholarship and research projects.
• Show a local cultural tradition can be the subject of academic attention in a way that is depoliticized, appreciative, and objective.

Digital methods and tools used in the teaching of the project

Textual analysis and corpus linguistics were used to allow students to compare between the transcripts of the performances and search for repetitive oral formulaic composition, identify characteristics of an individual performer, and research recitation rather than improvisation techniques by performers.

Specific tools:

• Voyant for textual analysis and visualization.
• Plagiarism software freely available to compare transcriptions.
• Python (via Jupyter Notebooks) to compare the linguistic characteristics of the performers (and, later, to compare transcriptions of a poet’s oral performances to those he produced for publication).

AMICAL, institutional and external support

The project was funded by two AMICAL small grants, an AUCA Faculty Research Grant, and a fellowship at the Elsevier at the Scaliger Institute, Leiden.

Publications that came out of the project

• Plumtree, James. 2019. “A Kyrgyz Singer of Tales: Formulas in Three Performances of the Birth of Manas by Talantaaly Bakchiev”, Доклады Национальной академии наук Кыргызской Республики 1: 125-133.
• ____. 2020. “Replicating the Birth of Manas: Composition Methods of Doolot Sydykov and Talantaaly Bakchiev”, with Alymkan Jeenbekova, Известия Национальной академии наук Кыргызской Республики 3: 175-187.
• ____. 2021. “Computer-Assisted Analysis of Manas Narratives: Demonstrations and Directions”, Manas Sosyal Araştırmalar Dergisi 10 (3): 1506-1515.
• ____. “A Contemporary Manaschi in Oral Performance and in Print”, Alatoo Academic Studies 1: 238-244.
• ____. 2021. “A Telling Tradition: Preliminary Comments on the Epic of Manas, 1856-2018”, in Medieval Stories and Storytelling: Multimedia and Multi-Temporal Perspectives, ed. S. C. Thomson, Medieval Narratives in Transmission 2 (Turnhout: Brepols), pp. 239-301.

Future plans

• Translation of a forthcoming volume of the publications resulting from this project into Kyrgyz is underway and will be supported by an AUCA Presidential Research and Education Fund (PREF) grant.
• A new expansion is being planned to explore historical versions, and potential comparisons with other Turkic oral epic traditions.

Partnering with other AMICAL institutions

The project team welcomes partnering with an AMICAL institution that has non-Latin script materials and resources – and, if possible, with an underexplored and understudied still surviving oral tradition. Project materials could be used by scholars and researchers to ask and address interests that are different from the initial and original project focus.